And now, the real thing

Czech born but English made, he has dazzled for 35 years with clever plays. Recent work has answered criticism that they lacked heart. Stephen Moss on a writer at the top of his game whose trilogy on the Russian revolution is about to open at the National Theatre

"The peasants are revolting: come at once" was the instruction from the National Theatre, where the large cast rehearsing Tom Stoppard's new trilogy about 19th-century Russia had dragooned director Trevor Nunn into giving them an extended lunch break to watch England play Argentina in the World Cup. Had it been a cricket match, dragging Stoppard away from a television for an interview would have been more difficult; football, it seems, he can take or leave.

Stoppard has been camped at the National for the past three months, occupying a corner of the rehearsal room where his panoramic treatment of Russian life has been taking shape, answering actors' questions, honing the script, adding a scene at Nunn's request, making the text (an empty thing, he always says, because theatre is an event) live.

Nunn had a triumph with Stoppard's Arcadia in 1993 and knows the form. "Tom sets the bar very high. He doesn't set out to help audiences or feel the need to instruct them, so you have to challenge him about how explicatory he is being. It's daunting stuff for actors - as complex a text as a Shakespeare - but it's also exhilaratingly funny and emotionally demanding." An outing for the heart as well as the mind, which is increasingly important to Stoppard, who is no longer happy to be written of (or indeed off) as "Clever Tom".

Close up, closeted in the chairman's office at the National, the first thing that strikes you about him is his vast head, with its mane of greying hair. Shaw's bust sits on an adjoining table, but Stoppard's head is the more imposing. He is tall and rangy, and wears a white T-shirt that accentuates the sag in his stomach. But he's not in bad shape for a 64-year-old (65 next month), though he smokes a great deal and is wheezing a bit after three flights of stairs.

Stoppard says that all his life he has been "overrated", but there is no reason to believe that to be true and it does not make him any less intimidating. He speaks slowly and deliberately, rolling his Rs prodigiously, and is punctilious in observing courtesies. Arcadia must have been an enjoyable play for him to write, for there is no doubt that Regency England would have suited him very well.

In his 20s, Stoppard was a journalist, and so self-possessed that by 25 - he had been a reporter and drama critic since he was 17 - he was bored, and anxious to make up his own stories instead. He understands the rules of interviews, the point of their pointlessness. "Is this all right for you?" he asks, interrupting a lengthy disquisition on what The Coast of Utopia , this monumental trilogy that has been five years in the writing and perhaps a lifetime in the thinking, is about . As an enterprising young journalist, he once concocted an "interview" with Harold Pinter, based entirely on published quotes. It was, of course, a triumph. "I never demand corrections," Stoppard once said. "If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true." These sentiments are probably not true. He is punctilious on facts: an autodidact, the small things really do matter. It's the big things he prefers to avoid in public.

Ira Nadel, professor of English at Vancouver University, has just produced a biography of Stoppard (Double Act, Methuen, £25). The professor realised his problem and comes clean about it early on in the book. His subject, who offered little help and refused to read the typescript, doesn't believe in biography. In Stoppard's view, biographers see the past through the wrong end of the telescope. He is equally suspicious of history, its bogus certainty. Stoppard is interested in the bit players in the human drama - like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, lurking furtively on the outer edges of Hamlet - and the people who disappeared from history. The central figure in the new trilogy is Alexander Herzen, the revolutionary history forgot.

In 1968, explaining his approach to theatre in the Sunday Times, Stoppard anticipated his Russian trilogy: "My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather sceptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it. I think I want to write about that lovely group of octogenarians who I believe inhabit a house in Bayswater, who had to flee in 1917 and who are hanging about waiting for the whole thing to blow over so that they can go back."

More than 30 years later he has found his structure: not a group of octogenarians in Bayswater, but a group of revolutionaries and idealists in mid-19th-century Russia - Herzen, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the novelist Ivan Turgenev and the critic Vissarion Belinsky - whose ideas and struggles, centring on the 1848 revolutions, prefigure 1917.

In Herzen, he has found a kindred spirit. "Herzen had no time for the kind of mono-theory that bound history, progress and individual autonomy to some overarching abstraction like Marx's material dialecticism," Stoppard wrote recently in the Observer. "What he did have time for... was the individual over the collective, the actual over the theoretical. What he detested was the conceit that future bliss justified present sacrifice and bloodshed. The future, said Herzen, was the offspring of accident and wilfulness. There was no libretto or destination, and there was always as much in front as behind."

"Accident and wilfulness" are central features in Stoppard's world. Kenneth Tynan noticed it, when writing a New Yorker profile in 1977. "For Stoppard art is a game within a game," wrote Tynan, "the larger game being life itself, an absurd mosaic of incidents and accidents in which (as Beckett, whom he venerates, says in the aptly titled Endgame) 'something is taking its course'. We cannot know what that something is, or whither it is leading us; and it is therefore impermissible for art, a mere derivative of life, to claim anything as presumptuous as a moral purpose or a social function." Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead - or they soon will be, even if they haven't yet grasped the gravity of the situation.

Stoppard came to prominence in the mid-60s, when art and politics were closely linked, and theatre, through the work of George Devine at the Royal Court and Joan Littlewood at Stratford East, sought to change the world. Stoppard would have none of that: his work had no overt "message", no political programme. In his Sunday Times anti-manifesto he wrote, "I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really."

Underpinning all his work and increasingly apparent in the later plays, however, is an attempt to come to terms with the characteristic Beckettian view that "I am a human nothing". In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead the landscape is bleak, the prospect forbidding. In Arcadia , Stoppard perhaps finds an answer to determinist despair. "We shed as we pick up," says Septimus Hodge, "like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short."

Stoppard was born Tomás Straüssler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, the son of Eugen Straüssler, a doctor with the Bata shoe company, and Martha Beckova. Both parents were Jewish, though neither was a practising Jew. All four of Stoppard's grandparents died in the Holocaust. When the Nazis moved into Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich sell-out, the Straüsslers fled to Singapore, one of several places where the Bata company was relocating its employees. Two years later the family had to flee again when the Japanese assault began, but this time without Eugen, who stayed behind (as a doctor he knew he would be needed) to aid the defence of Singapore. More than 50 years later, Stoppard discovered that his father drowned in February 1942, when the ship in which he was finally escaping was bombed by the Japanese. On the same day, Dr Straüssler's family - wife Martha, eldest son Petr and five-year-old Tomás (his mother called him Tomik) - were reaching Bombay, where Tomik/Tomás/ Tommy/Tom would be reborn, an English-speaking schoolboy in Raj India.

These are extraordinary beginnings, yet for most of his life Stoppard made light of them. He says he has no recollection of speaking Czech and that English quickly became his natural language. He became, in a phrase typical of the joshing 60s Stoppard, a "bounced Czech". His attitude to the death of his father was extraordinarily cool. "I"m afraid I don't recall worrying about my father," he said in 1987 in an interview celebrating his 50th birthday. "My memory really begins after I'd lost him. Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life." In the past few years, as he has revisited Zlin and sought out old friends and relatives of his family, he has tempered that coldness. "In my mind I always knew what my father looked like," he said in 1999 in a revealing account in Talk magazine of his return to Zlin the previous year.

The Straüsslers went to Darjeeling, where Tommy and Peter attended Mount Hermon school and their mother met and, in 1945, married Major Kenneth Stoppard. They continued to live in India, which Tom loved, before Stoppard's stepfather left the army and headed back to England in 1946.

Kenneth Stoppard, who returned to his old job as a sales rep with a steel company (a comedown after Raj life), was a disappointed man and stern disciplinarian. Stoppard's portrait of him in the Talk article is withering: "My stepfather... believed with Cecil Rhodes that to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life. His utopia would have been populated by landed gentry, honest yeomen and Gurkhas. 'Don't you realise,' he once reproached me when, aged nine, I innocently referred to my 'real father', 'don't you realise that I made you British'... When my mother had just died, the words which came to him were 'She was a very gallant lady', a formulation dating from Kipling's hill stations and the officers' mess."

Becoming British the Major Stoppard way meant fishing, sport, walks in the English countryside and boarding at a prep school in Nottinghamshire and at Pocklington Grammar School in Yorkshire, where Tom was an average student, a first XI cricketer and the target of bullies. "It wasn't a place I enjoyed being at," he says. "I did A levels but I didn't go to university. I took them when I was 17 and then left, and I was so pleased to be on the Western Daily Press in Bristol."

Stoppard enjoyed writing but was not an especially committed reporter. "He wasn't interested in the mundane side of journalism," says David Foot, a colleague of Stoppard's in Bristol. "He was preoccupied as a person; I was never sure with what. He was preoccupied even when he was keeping wicket."

He started reviewing drama and came under the spell of Peter O'Toole, whose vivid portrayals at the Bristol Old Vic were outshone only by his performances at the nearby Old Duke. "O'Toole would lead the cast to the pub after curtain," recalls Foot. "O'Toole moved very rapidly when he was thirsty and was always first there; Tom would follow, though he didn't drink very much."

By 1962 Stoppard had decided to become a full-time writer, moving to London to combine freelance journalism for the short-lived Scene magazine with writing scripts for radio and TV, as well as short stories and a novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (which, he always liked to claim, did very well in Venezuela). He also wrote five scripts for the radio serial, Mrs Dale's Diary, but they were rejected. In August 1965, he married Jose Ingle. They had met two years earlier when both had bedsits in the same dingy house in Notting Hill. Their first son, Oliver, was born in May 1966.

That year also saw the first performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by the Oxford Theatre Group at the Edinburgh fringe festival. It was met with a combination of boredom and incomprehension - with one significant exception. The Observer critic, Ronald Bryden, loved the play and hymned it loudly the following Sunday. Tynan bought it for the National and it opened at its Old Vic home in April 1967 to audiences who by now shared Bryden's point of view.

Stoppard had arrived and he was delirious. On the first night, he raced around Fleet Street picking up the late editions of the papers to see if they agreed that a star was born. They did. "As I went to bed that night," he said later, "I had an awful thought that this was some hoax the world was perpetrating on me."

"What is this play about?" he was asked on television. "It's about to make me very rich," he replied. Fame and wealth, he insisted, would not go to his head. "Success is a sort of metaphysical experience," he said. "I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go."

Interviews at the time suggest a settled home life with wife and child, but his wife Jose - from whom he was to separate three years later - made one remark which has been used against him since. "The hardest thing I've had to accept is that if I died or disappeared he'd be upset, but in the end his life wouldn't be all that different. Writing is the core of his existence."

Tynan calls Jose "a feminist before her time" who resented being overshadowed by her suddenly successful husband. In one interview, she was photographed wearing an apron bearing the legend "Mrs Stoppard" and, according to Nadel, she became increasingly frustrated in the late 60s. The birth of their second son Barnaby, in 1969, did not ease the situation. She "suffered from anxiety, became irritable and experienced excessive tension," says Nadel. Stoppard, who is said to hate rows, found the domestic pressures hard to take.

The couple separated later that year and divorced in 1972. Stoppard married Miriam Moore-Robinson (soon to become a celebrity in her own right as health expert Miriam Stoppard), who was pregnant with his third son, William. Two years later, they had another child, Edmund. Stoppard had custody of the children from his first marriage, and the family settled down together in a large country house in Buckinghamshire. Stoppard had become the quintessential Englishman.

John Wood, an actor closely associated with Stoppard (notable roles including Henry Carr in Travesties and AE Housman in The Invention of Love ), says Stoppard changed after his divorce. "The Tom I first knew in the late 60s is not to be seen now," says Wood. "He developed a carapace as he got older. The break-up of his first marriage caused him to close up. It made him vulnerable." Stoppard needed domestic stability to work, and with Miriam and the four boys, the dogs and cricket bats and fishing rods, and the rambling country house, he had it.

He enjoyed major successes in the early 70s with Jumpers, at once a murder mystery and a philosophical treatise, and Travesties , an account of an unlikely collision between Lenin, James Joyce and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1918. Witty, glittering, vertiginous - but was that enough? Tynan made clear his dislike of Travesties in his New Yorker profile: "What it lacks... is the sine qua non of theatre; namely, a narrative thrust that impels the characters... toward a credible state of crisis, anxiety or desperation." The critic, John Barber, also writing in 1977, was even more scathing. "Accepting that Stoppard is a serious artist," he wrote, "he is one who is too desperately determined to amuse at all costs. He unites the mind of an intellectual with the methods of a clown." Stoppard was part way to that realisation himself. "I think I enlist comedy to a serious pur pose," he told the American critic Mel Gussow in 1975. "[But] I wonder if I don't trivialise something serious. I think there will come a time when I will not want to write in comic terms."

In the mid-70s Stoppard became active on behalf of Soviet dissidents and visited the Sakharovs in Moscow in 1977; he supported Charter 77 - a pressure group campaigning for human rights in Czechoslovakia - and went to Prague to meet the recently released playwright Václav Havel, whose work he admired. From this involvement came Every Good Boy Deserves Favour , his musical-theatrical collaboration with André Previn, and the TV play Professional Foul. It was the start of his gradual acknowledgment of his Jewish and central European roots.

Clever Tom's evolution into Caring Tom continued with Night and Day (1978), an exploration of the ethics of journalism whose attack on the union closed shop irritated the left. The irritation turned to fury when Stoppard's support for Mrs Thatcher became public. For Stoppard, Thatcher meant a renewal of politics, a sort of linguistic truth, and less punitive tax rates. "I was very pleased with Mrs Thatcher at the beginning," he told Gussow a few years after her fall. "I thought of her as a subversive influence, which I found very welcome. The Wilson-Callaghan pre-Thatcher years in English politics I thought were nauseating."

Stoppard's plays were becoming more personal. The Real Thing (1982) is a funny, caustic examination of infidelity that centres on a witty, emotionally repressed playwright called Henry. Henry, however much the author might protest, is Stoppard. "Don't write it," pleads the daughter in the play. "Just say it."

"We always assumed that The Real Thing had a lot to do with Tom's marriage," says Kenneth Ewing, who has been Stoppard's agent for 40 years. "You wouldn't get Tom to say that, but I think it is pretty autobiographical. Henry the writer, who is very clever but can't actually cope with family life." Richard Eyre, who directed The Invention of Love in 1997, agrees. "Tom's a writer who reveals himself in everything he writes."

The 80s were not especially productive for Stoppard. His only major theatrical failure, Hapgood, dates from this period, and the gradual disintegration of his marriage to Miriam may have been a factor. His growing relationship with Felicity Kendal became front-page news, the Stoppards separated (they divorced in 1992), and Kendal separated from her husband, the director Michael Rudman. The press were convinced that she would move in with and marry Stoppard, but she never did, and she and her husband were later reconciled.

Stoppard was now on his own, though he remains close to both Miriam and to Felicity Kendal. Stoppard's sons, to whom he is devoted, are grown up, the country house was sold, and he has settled in a large flat in London's Chelsea Harbour - great views but "massively, expensively institutional and slightly Ceausescu-like in feeling", according to John Wood. He makes occasional forays to his house in Provence for periods of intense work.

Stoppard, who favours a monastic regime of beans on toast and cups of tea when he is alone , has evidently found solitude a stimulus to work. If the period from 1970-90 was spent collecting things, the last 10 years have been concerned with shedding them, stripping life down to what matters. The real Tom, the intellectual central European who always hid behind the games-playing super- Englishman, was emerging. The plays, too, have deepened and taken on a new texture: Nunn says The Coast of Utopia has a Chekhovian range and power.

"I'm a very shy, private person and I camouflaged myself by display rather than by reticence," Stoppard admitted in 1997. "I became a repressed exhibitionist. I found emotional self-exposure embarrassing - and now I don't, or less so. The older I get, the less I care about self- concealment. Time is limited... You have to choose what matters."

The 90s saw his greatest triumphs: Arcadia in 1993; his Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love in 1998; a knighthood in 1997; admission to the Order of Merit in 2000. He is a public figure, the longest-serving member of the board of the National Theatre, a renowned party-giver, a sparkling dinner party guest, a man whose views are much sought after.

He is currently working on film adaptations of Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever and Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials - he enjoys movies and the money's good. But part of him is also withdrawing - to his Chelsea Harbour ivory tower, to his remote French farmhouse, to a hazy past (early-19th-century Derbyshire, late-19th-century Oxford, mid-19th-century Russia).

Paradoxically, like his friend and pop alter ego, Mick Jagger, Stoppard's hyper-celebrity protects his privacy. The range and variety of his work - everything from plays about quantum mechanics (Hapgood) and chaos theory (Arcadia) to uncredited rewrites on the Indiana Jones movies - make him unclassifiable. Nadel organises an elaborate hunt, but the quarry is elusive. The man who gives lavish parties at the Chelsea Physic Garden is still an enigma to the hundreds of gilded guests. His friends all call him "charming", but charm is another defence.

The boy from Zlin and the sage of Chelsea - two figures separated by 60 years of invention. "There is no perfectly rational explanation for any of this," wrote Kenneth Tynan. "It is simply true."